The retraction count is up to 13 for Dutch psychology fraudster Diederik Stapel, with four more in the publications the Journal of Consumer Research, Motivation & Emotion,Psychology & Marketing, andSocial Cognition.

Here are the notices:

From the Journal of Consumer Research, a paper cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

It has come to our attention that “The Self-Activation Effect of Advertisements: Ads Can Affect Whether and How Consumers Think about the Self,” by Debra Trampe, Diederik A. Stapel, and Frans W. Siero, which appeared in the April 2011 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research (vol. 37, no. 6), contained fraudulent data that had been manipulated and at times fabricated by Diederik A. Stapel. This has been determined by a joint investigation by the Universities of Tilburg, Groningen, and Amsterdam. We are therefore informing our readers that this article has been retracted. We apologize for any problems that the publication of this article may have caused.

The article “Happiness as alchemy: Positive mood leads to self-serving responses to social comparisons” by Camille S. Johnson and Diederik A. Stapel has been retracted from publication at the request of the first author.

We at Motivation and Emotion were informed of the need to retract the article from the scientific literature on October 13, 2011. Our decision to issue this retraction was based on the October 31, 2011, report and recommendation from Tilburg University’s Levelt committee, which found that contributions to the paper by the second author were based on fictitious data or fictitious scientific studies.

The following article from Psychology & Marketing, “Beauty as a tool: The effect of model attractiveness, product relevance, and elaboration likelihood on advertising effectiveness” by Trampe, D., Stapel, D. A., Siero, F. W., & Mulder, H. published online on 4 Nov. 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal Editor-in-Chief, Ronald Jay Cohen, and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. following the results of an investigation into the work of Diederik A. Stapel (https://www.commissielevelt.nl/). The Levelt Committee has determined that this article contained data that was fabricated as supplied by Diederik A. Stapel. His co-authors were unaware of his actions, and not in any way involved.

The following article is being retracted from publication in Social Cognition: “The Mental Roots of System Justification: System Threat, Need for Structure, and Stereotyping” by Diederik A. Stapel and Marret K. Noordewier, 29(3), 238-254, doi: 10.1521/soco.2011.29.3.238

The Editor and Publishers of Social Cognition have jointly determined to retract the article. For further details, please visit the following link: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/levelt-committee

Doesn’t seem really convincing to me: only notifying the other contributors. What about the readers? And with plagiarism, at least the texts itself are still correct; in the Stapel fraud case the texts are just plain wrong.

And a similar question is how to retract chapters from dissertations? Or even more painful, a complete dissertation?

Interesting to see what, if anything, happens to the book chapters in which fraud has been determined:

Stapel, D.A., (2007). In the mind of the beholder: The interpretation comparison model of accessibility effects. In D.A. Stapel & J.Suls (Eds.) Assimilation and contrast in social psychology (p 313-327). New York, NY, USA: Psychology Press.

Stapel, D.A. (2011). Priming as proxy: Understanding the subjectivity of social life. In K.C. Klauer, A. Voss and C. Stahl (Eds.), Cognitive methods in social psychology (pp. 148-183). New York Guilford Publications.

“Note: The hardcover edition of this book contained a chapter titled “Priming as Proxy: Understanding the Subjectivity of Social Life,” by D. A. Stapel. This chapter has been retracted by joint decision of the publisher and the book’s editors. Please see https://www.commissielevelt.nl/levelt-committee/fraud-determined (item 49) for further details.”

That’s because they use the first few words to set up the shock and awe claim (for faddy journals like Psychological Science, that is what they demand), followed by the more technical and boring description.

The retraction was published online December 25, 2011, according to the retraction notice. The “paper” version (with volume numbers, etc) would always be later than that. Apparently, Motivation & Emotion is one of those journals with a very long backlog of papers still to be published “in print”, resulting in the long time between the online retraction and the printed retraction.